


Sand and Starlight

by picapica



Series: a hand to hold [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-01-07
Packaged: 2018-05-11 10:40:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5624134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/picapica/pseuds/picapica
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rey lost fifteen years to Jakku, to the dirt and the dust, to a hard-scrabble existence amongst the desperate and the dying and the already dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

She knows three things. She is small and scared and they are all she has here on this sun-scorched planet with its big sky and bigger horizons.

One, her name (Rey). Two, her age (six). Three – they’ll come back (they will).

They have to.

The first few days are the hardest. Rey is small and scared and this world is brimming over with the hungry eyes of the starving. She has a bruise on her arm from where strange hands kept her from running back to them, and a nick on her cheek where she wriggled free and fell on her face into the sand and grit. It’s stopped bleeding, and now it just aches.

It's the first day, and Rey’s on a speeder, pressed flat against the hot rattle of the engine. The stranger is a heavy weight behind her. There’s a long linen wrap around her face, but even with the protection the sand stings at her. Through the mottled orange of the oversized goggles that had been jammed over her head the sand leaping up around them looks almost like fire. It makes her uneasy, so she looks higher, to the jagged white trail of the ship that had taken them away. It’s breaking up, pulled this way and that by the wind. Rey watches it without blinking until it’s almost gone and her eyes hurt as much as her face.

They stop when the beige sky darkens to a brown sunset. The sun is a fat orange circle, bigger than what she’s used to, its image dancing in the heat haze. The speeder gurgles to a halt and even when the stranger cuts the engine it shudders and ticks and hisses. Rey closes her eyes and lets unfamiliar hands lift her away from it, and somewhere in there she falls asleep for real.

She opens her eyes to grey and brown. There’s metal over her head and grit beneath her cheek, but when she flexes her fingers she feels fabric beneath her. A bed. A shelter. She sits up and stares around, finding a patchwork world. The roof above her is a long panel of dark metal. It’s held up by poles that are braced together by netting and linked by long sheets. Daylight shines through them.

“Here.”

A bowl, chipped. It looks like it could have been an old helmet. There’s something grey and watery in it, and a hunk of bread. She grabs the plate and stuffs it into her mouth in huge pieces. Broth runs down her chin, and Rey wipes it with her hand.

The stranger watches her. She’s a tall, bony woman, with sand-blasted cheekbones and a rip in the lobe of her left ear. “Don’t waste any,” she says, her voice even but her eyes reproachful. “That’s all for today.”

The bowl is almost empty. Rey’s chin is damp and flecked with crumbs. She’s eaten meals this size just for breakfast before. She doesn’t say anything, but the woman must catch something in her face, because she huffs. A tired smile brightens her face for an instant before fading.

“Welcome to Jakku, kid.”

* * *

They wash their plates clean in the sand. Water isn’t for washing, out here. It’s her first lesson.

The sun is peaking and the heat is searing, so they go back under their shelter. The woman scrapes at the floor and then they lie together on the sand that had been kept cool beneath the top layer. It’s there, as they try to last through the hottest part of the day, that she notices the ticking of the roof.

“Solar panels,” the woman tells her, seeing her interest.

The panels run a water reclaimer, which the woman shows to her when the heat lessens a fraction. It’s a messy thing full of live wires and tape, but the woman is so careful with it that its worth here is obvious. Here, on Jakku, a planet with skies made beige by sand, where children can be given to strangers for safekeeping.

The water reclaimer spits out a fine dribble of warm water that she gulps down, though she slows when the woman gives her a sharp look, careful not to miss any of it like she had yesterday. She’ll piss here later, in the bucket with the hose that will take it up to be recycled and drunk again. In the now, they both drink what they need and then the woman fills two plastic cartons with it and leads her back outside. The wind is weaker today and a great panel of blue sky has opened up, the beige shrinking back a little. The woman doesn’t even glance at it but Rey can’t look away. It’s so big she feels like she could fall into it if she steps too high.

The woman lifts her up onto the speeder and then climbs on behind, and they’re off again. They skate over dunes that tower like mountains and down dry, cracked valleys that haven’t seen rain in a million years. There’s a shape in the distance that stands higher than even the tallest dune, and as they come closer and closer it resolves into an enormous grey wedge of metal that casts a pointed shadow out more than a kilometre over the sands. After so much nothing, it’s impossible to look away from. Tens of thousands of windows streak its great girth, and a cannon the size of a tower block juts up from the ruined prow.

They stop the speeder by the belly of the beast, and then they approach.

“Durasteel,” the woman tells her, when she touches it with a small hand. Then, “Watch,” as she pulls a screwdriver from a pouch on her belt and uses it to lever open an old airlock hatch. It clatters open, and the woman ducks through.

Rey stands paralysed. She could run. She could take that speeder – try to, at least – and make for the spaceport she’d been left at. She could sneak onto a ship, punch skywards, and then—

They would come back for her, and she wouldn’t be here.

She follows the woman into the dark.

* * *

The tunnel they’re walking down is rounded with ladder rungs above their heads from when the ship wasn’t sideways and half-ruined in the sand. There’s a rack with suit lockers where maintenance workers could have prepared for a spacewalk, but the suits are long gone, and so is most of the security wiring.

They pass through a secondary airlock and then the ship goes from stark functionality to some semblance of design. There are panels with sleek regular hollows that would once have been lights. The floor is still shiny beneath all the grime.

The woman leaves these nicer parts of the ship for more maintenance tunnels, and then starts using that screwdriver again. She opens up three access panels before she hits on one that hasn’t been tampered with, and she gestures the girl over to look. “Watch,” she says, and points out all the components piece-by-piece. She says them at Rey until she can parrot them back, and then she points at them again in order of value and begins to disassemble them.

They go through nineteen more panels – Rey keeps count – before the woman seems satisfied. Then they carry the parts back outside to the speeder and head back to the shelter. The sun is low again. The second night approaches.

It’s cold that night, enough for frost to glitter on the dunes, and Rey cries and hopes the woman won’t hear.

There’s no food the next morning. Rey’s belly gurgles, feels taut beneath her dirty clothes, but the woman says nothing. They go outside and get onto the speeder. They don’t talk.

This time they cross smaller dunes, and Rey could swear the sand here shifts and sighs as they cross it. The sun rises higher and higher, and they don’t take shelter. Rey’s skin prickles uncomfortably. She pulls the linen scarf higher around her face and tries to curl into the shadow of the speeder, but the sun is almost directly overhead and there is no relief to be had.

They climb another dune, and when they crest it the ground falls away. A crater some hundred kilometres across stretches before them, and while Rey is still staring the woman begins their descent. There’s a town down there – a collection of linen tents and old metal husks – and Rey stares at the growing buildings with greedy eyes. This is the spaceport. This is where they left her.

They get off the speeder just outside of town, and Rey runs ahead before the woman can stop her. There are people here – humans and not-humans, all of them with hollow cheeks and shadowed eyes. A mon calamari woman stands in the meagre shade of a repurposed cockpit. Her round fishlike eyes are dull and dry, and her barbels hang stiff and dead below the sad curve of her mouth.

She turns and stares and runs but she doesn’t see them. The woman finds her standing in the same shadow as the mon calamari, and she pats Rey on the head with a leathery palm before walking away.

Rey follows her.

* * *

The woman was Selpa Secunda, and she’s three years dead when Rey has her first blood. She’s thirteen, still living in their old shelter with its solar panel roof and its water reclaimer, and she stares at her ruined linens and doesn’t know what to do. She can’t wash them with water, but the scent of blood will carry in the strong desert winds and losing the water reclaimer itself would be a much more severe loss.

She takes the linens out on the speeder and drags them for miles through the sand. When she gets back she spends an hour working herself up to it before digging through Selpa’s private locker. It’s the first time she’s seen inside of it, and her hands tremble and hesitate over things like hair ties, sewing needles, shoes too big for Rey to wear.

There’s a box at the bottom of it, and she finds a rubbery cup inside. She’s seen it before, when Selpa was still alive to have bloods of her own. They used to take the speeder out some five kilometres away so that they could bury the blood safely in the sand.

She never saw Selpa wash the cup in sand, and it’s too clean. Still, it takes her long minutes to get herself to actually get over the taboo, and even then she only takes out tiny handfuls of water and washes the cup with her fingers, rinsing the dust and sand of three years of abandonment.

It takes her three tries to get it inside of her, and she cries because it is strange and frightening, and at the end of the day she takes the speeder out and empties it. When she puts it in again she doesn’t cry, just closes her eyes and thinks _they will come back, they will come back, they will come back_ until it is done.

She only has her blood three more times before her shelter is found by a lucky scavenger, and then she loses the water reclaimer and the solar panel and her bed and Selpa’s locker and her blood stops for over a year as her body does its best just to keep her alive.

Then she finds the AT-AT and she starts again with all the knowledge that Selpa gave her and a lot more she’s learnt since, and nine years later she meets Finn and Poe and Han and Leia and—

* * *

She meets Poe for the first time already a Jedi. He’s a beautiful man with a sweetness to his smile and sleepy dark eyes, and she eyes him with immediate suspicion. Finn she gets – scared and fumbling and as new to it all as she is, but Poe…this is his world. It shows in the easiness of his smiles and the relaxed slump of his shoulders where Rey and Finn are both livewires, exposed and sparking at anything that comes too close.

Rey is a livewire, at least. Finn is still – asleep. That’s the nicest word for it. She kisses his forehead, lets her lips linger there. She can feel him, his presence in the Force. He’s a warm amber light that she could close her eyes and sink into.

“Oh, I—”

It’s Poe. He’s standing behind her. She can feel him in the Force too, a bright green bubble that’s rapidly deflating the longer she stays silent. She turns and smiles at him, an expression that feels strained and must look it too from the slight widening of his eyes. “He’s not hurting,” she tells him, and it sounds like Luce speaking through her.

“Probably all those painkillers,” says Poe, with a weak smile. “He’ll be loopy for weeks when he’s up.”

“I’ll bet,” she says, turning back to Finn.

Poe comes closer, until she can see him in her peripheral vision. “You wanna get a bite?”

“No.”

“It’s just that the nurse said you’ve been here since morning, and it’s past lunch—”

“ _No._ ”

He takes a step back. His Force presences brightens, if anything, and Rey looks up at him despite herself. “You can’t help him by punishing yourself,” he says, the most serious he’s been around her. “I’d know.”

“You barely even know him,” she says.

“You don’t know him either,” he shoots back. “But he’s a good guy. I know he is.”

Rey scrutinises him for a long moment, but Poe isn’t Force sensitive. He believes what he’s saying, though, and Rey looks back to Finn’s face, relaxed in sleep. “He is,” she agrees. She stands, and Poe looks at her in surprise. “Do you know if the cafeteria will have anything left?”

“Not anything good,” he says, sounding pleased. They turn from Finn and walk away, and Rey presses her nails into her palms until she stops wanting to glance back at him.

Rey thinks of Jakku and Selpa and huffs out a laugh. “Sounds fine by me.”

He leads, and she follows. This is his world, and she doesn’t question it when he takes her away from the cafeteria to the outside. She’s never going to say no to being out in a world this lush, even after months of the storm-swept isle that Luke had chosen for his penance.

He takes her to his X-Wing. It’s a lovely ship, sharp and swift, wings pocked with old scars and it guns scorched at the muzzle tips. Poe climbs up onto its wing, and she follows, and she sits on the wing with her legs dangling while he reaches into the cockpit. There’s a lockbox in there, she thinks, eyeing him with new curiosity as he comes back, turning with fruit in both hands. Actual fruit, with thick peel and juicy segments and a strong sweet scent. Rey takes it from him fast enough it’s almost a snatch, and misses his smile as she bites straight into it without peeling. The juice is strong enough it’s almost sour, and she slurps it down eagerly as Poe delicately takes off the peel in a long curling strip, like he’s unwrapping a gift.

Rey eats the pith and the peel, and then eats Poe’s as well when he offers it to her.

“Thank you,” she says, because while fruit might not mean as much on this lush green world as it did on Jakku, it came from his lockbox and that makes it valuable in its own right.

“You’re welcome,” he says. Then, a few minutes later, as they sit together with a new ease, he tips his head towards the open cockpit and there’s a question in his eyes that she can’t say no to.

They fly together and Rey thinks of Jakku and skies big enough to fall into, and she isn’t afraid.

* * *

Finn wakes, weeks later. He’s wobbly and dazed but he’s awake, and Rey and Poe sit together with thighs pressed warm against one another and watch him as he blinks up at them with bleary eyes.

“Hey,” says Poe, and his tone is tender and raw and Rey understands something she didn’t before, not even after weeks of daily flights and shared fruits. Oranges and plums and peaches. There are so many kinds of fruit, and Rey wants to learn them all.

“Hey,” mumbles Finn, and Poe smiles that beautiful smile, and Rey leans just a little bit harder against him.

“How do you feel?” she asks, and Finn makes a big deal of considering it before he lifts a shaky hand and wobbles it from side to side.

They all laugh, and it feels clean and new and hopeful, and a month later Rey kisses Poe and the Force sings around them. She turns and kisses Finn and the Force  _quakes_ and so does her belly as Poe slides his arm around her, his palm big and warm on her skin. Then Poe and Finn kiss, her boys, their mouths a slick push until Poe slides a palm up the back of Finn’s skull and guides him into something sweeter, better. Finn follows his deft little nips for a few moments, learning, and then he pushes forwards and Poe groans and dips back, and Rey catches him without touching him. They stop and part, mouths wet, waiting for her.

She goes.

* * *

She knows three things, now. One, her name (Rey Skywalker). Two, her age (twenty-one). Three, that you need to chase after the things you want, not wait for them to come to you (she's still so conflicted about Luke, she dreams of his face some night and wakes with wet cheeks). 

There's a fourth thing, actually, and it's difficult to explain but it's there when Poe smiles and when Finn does that boyish grin and when they fly together, all three of them, her and Poe in the cockpit and Finn on the guns. It's magic, it's real. It's the Force. 

 

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

The woman only becomes Selpa after six months on Jakku. Rey is closer to seven than six now, and she’s almost used to the constant ache of hunger. She doesn’t think she’ll ever get used to how awful everything tastes, but it’s funny how little you care about flavour when you’re starving by increments.

It’s been a bad winter – ha, winter! – with icy nights and storms strong enough to strip paint from their speeder. They’ve only managed the trip out to the Star Destroyer four times since that first day or so, and despite hauling back enough each time to have the speeder limping along barely an inch above the sand it’s hardly brought them enough at Nima for one person, let alone two.

Their solar panels and water reclaimer are too precious to consider trading, no matter how hungry they become.

It’s morning, and Rey is using the slanting light to inspect the sloping underside of the roof. She holds a brush made from her own hair and carefully flicks grit out of the seams. It’s finely made, but Jakku’s sandstorms are vicious things, especially when they go on for days at a time.

There’s movement at the edge of her field of vision, and she whips her head around to see an approaching speeder. The woman has already woken and spotted it somewhere in that moment, and is standing. Rey watches as she picks up her rifle blaster, but when the woman doesn’t move to aim she relaxes a little. Only by a smidgen, though. On Jakku it pays to be suspicious.

There’s a human on the speeder. A man. After months of seeing only the woman or Plutt’s ugly Crolute mug when they go to Nima to trade, it’s a weird sight. Rey gets off the stool she’s been standing on and sets her brush carefully on top of the woman’s private lockbox.

He pulls up his speeder next to theirs, and gets off so stiffly that Rey only just manages to stop the instinctive motion to go help him. The engine grinds when he takes it out of gear, and he slaps the rusted hull until its squeals fade into silence.

“Dogma,” says the woman, as he approaches them. There’s a heavy bag swung over one slumped shoulder, and Rey stares at it as if she can bore a hole through to the contents.

“Selpa,” the man bites back, and Rey startles because that’s a _name_. “It’s true, then,” he says, nodding towards Rey. She blinks at him and steps behind the woman. Behind Selpa. “You went and got yourself another mouth to feed. Softening up at last?"

“Say that again and I’ll blow your head off.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t,” Selpa agrees, and Rey watches in amazement as she sets the rifle on the ground and goes to greet the man with her mouth. It’s a biting thing, teeth on cracked lips and clutching hands, and then it’s over and they rip apart and circle, their eyes bright and hard and intent on one another.

“Thought you might need something,” drawls the man, and he strums his fingers over the worn strap of his bulging bag. “Extra supplies. Enough to get you through the end of the storm season. You and the kid.”

“Name your price,” says Selpa, and there’s a weird expression on her face that Rey doesn’t know what to do with. The man shakes his head and kicks the bag towards them, and Selpa grabs it up and shoves it into Rey’s arms. “ _Dogma_ ,” she snaps, turning towards him again. “I won’t owe you a favour, so name your kriffing price!”

“No price,” he says. “I won’t do that to you.”

“I’m not giving you our water,” snarls Selpa, snatching up the rifle again and pointing it right between his eyes. He yelps and leaps backwards. “You want our water? You’re not having it.”

“I don’t want your kriffing water!” he shouts. “Hells, Selpa, I just want you to be all right!”

“I am all right,” she says, lowering the rifle again. “I don’t have anything else to give you.”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Everyone wants _something_ ,” she scoffs, and Dogma shakes his head and walks back through the linen sheets and to his speeder. He climbs on and rides off without looking back, though Selpa stares after him for a long time.

He wouldn’t have been the first Selpa has lain with while Rey has been with her. She’s given hands and mouth and body many times on their infrequent visits to Nima – for supplies, for water, for cloth, for simple pleasure. Jakku is a harsh world, and Selpa takes her comforts alongside her business.

She’s never stared after her partners like she does this one, though.

* * *

Dogma’s supplies are enough for the rest of the winter storms and then some. Selpa’s careful rationing means that on their usual portions they have food to last them until winter swings round again. Selpa doesn’t laugh, but Rey does, high and hysterical, tossing handfuls of sand because the rations are too precious to touch. She rolls onto her back and makes an angel out of sand, and then she jumps up and watches it dissolve back into shapelessness.

They make use of the time. They spend the first day numbering and burying their rations, and then on the second they take a whole seven-count's worth of meals and a huge carton of water outside to the speeder and they’re off. The dunes have shifted a little in the time since they last came this way, but Selpa never hesitates and, somewhere along the line, Rey has come to trust her.

The Star Destroyer looms terrible and enormous on the horizon, and Rey sets her head against the throb of the speeder’s engine and closes her eyes.

Selpa goes to wake her when they reach it but Rey is already up, disturbed by the sudden cool plunge into the ship’s immense shadow. They climb off the speeder and gutter its engines. They spend long minutes sharing out the weight of their supplies, eyes wary on the vastness of the sands all around them. The amount of food they’re carrying feels like a target on their backs, and Rey still doesn’t know why they’ve got so much – or why they’ve even brought it out here at all.

She does wonder where Dogma got it all from, though.

Selpa leads her through their usual access hatch, but from there it’s all different. They keep away from the maintenance tunnels with their valuable circuits and stick to the minimalistic personnel areas, which a younger Rey would have been awed by but the current Rey examines with more practical eyes and judges as worthless.

They go up and up, climbing ladders through disused elevator shafts, and in all this time Selpa never hesitates. Even when they get to blast doors that are still sealed shut, Selpa knows what panels to pull and what manual hinges to mess with to get them to open. These areas are cleaner. There haven’t been any boots here to track in the sand from outside, and the windows are unbroken. Rey peers out through one and feels sick at the height of it, and Selpa pulls her away and onwards.

They stop in a side room, a long low space with a bed and a desk and a cracked picture frame lying facedown on a shelf. Selpa sits on the bed, and Rey sits beside her. Her feet don’t reach the floor, so she swings them.

“You heard some things, with Dogma,” says Selpa, and Rey nods. “You're a smart kid. I figure if I don't tell you, you'll find out anyway."

Rey stops swinging her feet. “The truth?"

“This ship was mine,” Selpa says, after enough time that Rey has begun to jiggle her feet again. “Before it crashed. She was called the _Inflictor_.”

Rey stares up at her with round eyes. “You worked here?”

“I lived here,” Selpa corrects. She pauses, and smiles, and it’s the first smile Rey’s seen that isn’t bitter. “It was my ship.”

“You’re the _Captain?_ ”

“Captain Ciena Ree,” Selpa tells her. “And I'm not the Captain. Not anymore. Nowadays I’m just Selpa.”

* * *

They sleep in what Rey later learns was Selpa’s old berth, the Captain’s quarters, and the next morning they eat out on the sloping brow of the _Inflictor,_ looking down on the long plumes of sand dragged into the air by the desert winds. They’re above it, up here, or high enough it feels like they are. When Rey lays on her back all she can see is blue, brilliant and without any beige in sight.

“Dogma was in the same prison as me,” Selpa tells her, and Rey rolls onto her side so she can see her. “He shot a corrupt general, and somewhere along the way they conveniently lost the proof that the general was crooked and he ended up in the same prison as me. An enemy Star Destroyer captain,” she adds, shaking her head. “The poor fuck.”

“How’d you get out?” asks Rey, because Selpa here on the Destroyer is a different woman, one who laughs and smiles and shares, and Jakku has taught Rey to be greedy.

“I didn’t, but he did,” says Selpa. “His old buddies came for him, and he wouldn’t go without me. This was the only real place we could hide away. They’d never think I’d come back here,” she says, sweeping a hand down towards the vast line of the ship’s ruined prow where it’s buried in the sand. “It’s the scene of my great failure, after all. I’ve been here what, six years now? Seven? You lose track.”

Rey studies Selpa carefully. “He loves you.”

“Yeah,” she says, blowing out a long breath. “Yeah, I know.”

“You kissed him.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” says Selpa, and she stands and stretches. “Come on. Got some stuff to show you.”

 _No more questions_ , screams her body language. Even this new sharing version Selpa has her limits, it seems. Rey gets up and follows her back in through a broken window and they spend the rest of the day almost silent, Rey trailing Selpa from room to room and corridor to corridor as she restlessly searches for whatever it is she wants to show to Rey.

They find it a few hours later, in a private room with a large window that lets in enough of Jakku’s sunlight that Rey has to throw a hand up to shield her eyes. The room is empty except for some mats that must have been thrown up against the wall by the impact. Rey is bewildered by all the unused space.

“It’s a meditation room,” Selpa tells her, seeing her confusion.

“A what?”

“A room where you come just to sit and think,” says Selpa.

Rey stares around in new amazement. This is a kind of luxury she would never have guessed at. “A whole room just to sit quietly?”

“The Jedi needed that kind of thing. Got them closer to the Force.”

“Jedi?”

“Dogma worked for them,” Selpa tells her. Her expression twists. “Galactic peacekeepers with laser swords and weird powers.”

“You know more about them than that,” says Rey, seeing the secrets hiding behind her tongue. 

Selpa grabs the mat and drags it to the middle of the floor, and sits on it. She pats the spot beside her and Rey takes it, and together they stare out over the vast sandy expanses of Jakku. “The Jedi weren’t my people, kid. And most of it was before me. There’s only so much I can tell you.”

“Tell me as much as you can,” Rey begs, and that’s how she learns the legend of Luke Skywalker.

* * *

Pulling out of the dive flattens her against her seat so hard that she can’t breathe. Ten seconds pass and then the crush eases off and she’s gulping down air, euphoric at the rush of it, and Poe reaches back and grabs one of her hands in his and they whoop together as he noses his bird forwards into another dive. She floats in her seat, weightless like in prehistory before they figured out gravity generators, and her stomach flips and twists but she’s grinning from ear to ear.

They level out at the top of the atmosphere, skating on blue, and Poe is still holding her hand. He squeezes, and she squeezes back, and then they pitch over again and yell all the way through the burn of re-entry.

Poe lands them with exquisite gentleness, and when he pops the lid on the cockpit Rey leaps out and hauls him with her and hugs him with both of them standing on the wing.

“I’ve never flown for fun before,” she tells him, honest like she’s learnt to be in the whirlwind since leaving Jakku for good. Poe pulls back out of the hug and claps her shoulder with his hand and she smiles a Finn smile at him, one of those big wide white ones. “Thank you. Thank you!”

He shakes his head. “No, it’s – it’s nothing. My pleasure.”

There’s a look in his eyes, one she saw a hundred different times on Dogma, but it’s softer, made gentle by this gentler world. He wants her. He’s beautiful and he wants _her_ and her belly warms at the thought of it.

Luke is watching her from some fifty metres away, a horrendously obvious splotch of brown cloak and silvered beard. His face is etched with sadness as he watches her with Poe, as he sees Poe’s eyes on her, and the heat in Rey’s gut curdles and dies. She meets Luke’s eyes, and he stares at her for a long time – long enough that Poe notices and turns, his smile slipping off his face in exchange for near-comical politeness.

Then Luke smiles, and for just an instant he’s the farm boy Selpa told her about, boyish and lovely and kind.

“Did he just – approve?” asks Poe. He flushes. He really is very pretty. “Not – not that there’s anything _to_ approve."

Rey would be angry if it was about approval because she doesn’t need it, not from anyone, but she doesn’t think that’s what it was. She remembers Selpa and Dogma and Leia and Han, and she shakes her head slowly and curls her fingers into the crook of Poe’s arm.

Luke had stared at her like Selpa had stared at the Star Destroyer, like she was something lost, and Rey can’t remember her mother’s face but she’s willing to bet she looks an awful lot like her.

* * *

She doesn’t think about it – Luke seeing her face and thinking of her mother and _grieving_ – for a day, and then another and another and then Finn wakes up so she boxes it away for another time. Here in the now Finn is warm and alive and lovely, and she strokes his sweaty brow and leans on Poe and is content.

There’s physiotherapy, and it leaves Finn swearing and grumpy but it also means that he slowly inches his way off the bed and back onto his feet. Rey gives him her staff the first day he walks ten paces without falling, and after that he refuses a crutch and uses it instead. That first day he’s tired, and when he lays down the staff is still in his hand, tight enough that when Rey goes to pull it from him it doesn’t come. She could tug it free but she lets him keep it instead, and it feels like the right decision. And if he keeps it the second day, and the third, and every day after (he does), then that feels right too. It certainly makes him easy to find – that jacket, with its painstakingly repaired back, that staff, that smile. He walks into a room and suddenly all eyes are on him and he doesn’t know what to do with it. Her lovely flustered boy.

She takes his elbow and more than a little of his weight so that his stride comes easier. They cross to an empty table, and Poe comes over from his place leaning by the wall behind the busy table he heads up with the other pilots and pulls out Finn’s chair. Finn scowls at him but he’s still too sore to do anything beyond sink gratefully into the seat. Rey sits at his right, Poe on his left, and they sandwich him between their chatter about Poe’s birds until the canteen shutters lift and the food service starts. It’s usually a polite scrum on base when it comes to food, but when Rey stands up everyone seems to stop for a moment. She smiles the best the can but there’s still that wariness, that deference, and she feels like she’s going to break her own teeth from how much she’s gritting them.

Poe slings an arm around her shoulders and tosses a wink at a mon calamari woman who’s wearing a ground team jumpsuit. Her barbels waggle and the crowd eases, and Rey slots herself in behind Poe as he scoops up three trays and joins a queue that only qualifies as such by the skin of its teeth. She gets jostled but it’s better than the wide-eyed looks of before, and she squeezes Poe’s elbow gratefully.

A few more winks and sleepy-eyed smiles get them a plate that’s near overflowing with fruit and foods Rey doesn’t recognise. Poe piles one of the other trays high with bread and butter, and then a veritable brick of meat for the last one.

“Cutlery,” he tells her as he balances them on his arms, and Rey nods before he’s gone in the crowd and she realises that she has no idea what he means. She knows what cutlery is, yes, but not what bits and pieces she needs. She finds a bucket full of all sorts of weirdly shaped things and grabs a handful, hoping for the best. Poe doesn’t laugh when she sets it all on the table, but she can see that he wants to so she smiles at him to let him know he's allowed.

They share all the food, and Rey eyes the mass of metal cutlery suspiciously and eats with her fingers instead. Elbow-to-elbow, all three of them, the table all to themselves and Rey’s old staff wedged down the side of Finn’s chair.

“Sorry about,” says Poe with his mouth full, waving a hand at the plates. “The base—” because saying _Starkiller_ makes it seem real, “—it took out a lot of places where our supplies come from. We’ll get better stuff sometime. Gotta treat a lady right,” he adds, and Rey reaches around Finn to swat his arm.

Still, that Poe thinks this feast is rations – it sobers Rey right up, and she stares down at her overflowing plate and closes her eyes for a moment. For Selpa. For Jakku. For a childhood as lost as dead or estranged lovers.

“You gonna drink that?” asks Finn, and she opens her eyes and shakes her head and watches him take her cup and drain it. Water flecks his chin, and Rey thinks of Jakku and pissing into a bucket and drinking water still warm from her body, Selpa with her gun to Dogma’s head. She smiles, and Poe tilts his head in question and she waves a hand at him and he lets it be.

Finn wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and Rey wipes Jakku from her mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So! Selpa Secunda is actually Captain Ciena Ree of the Imperial-class Star Destroyer Inflictor, which is the huge crashed ship seen on Jakku in the Graveyard of Giants area of desert. Ree crashed Inflictor to prevent it falling into Rebel hands, and when taken into custody she refused to give up Imperial information despite having lost her faith in the Empire. Her lover was Thane Kyrell, a Rebel aristocrat who is the sole reason she survived the crash. The Empire thought she had died with her ship and awarded her high honours. 
> 
> Dogma is from the Clone Wars animated TV show. He's a clone from the 501st, serving under General Anakin Skywalker before Order 66. While temporarily under the control of the corrupt General Pong Krell, Dogma and the other troopers committed treason by capturing and executing Krell, for which Dogma was taken into custody. It's never made clear what happens to Dogma (he killed a Jedi, but Krell had purposefully caused the deaths of thousands of clone troopers during his career), so I decided to bring him in. Treason is an extreme offense, so I placed him nearby Ree, who chose her new name as he told her about clone culture (specifically, how they develop names other than their designations). Dogma eventually falls in love with Selpa, and when he is freed by some surviving clones he insists on taking Selpa with them. There aren't many places a group of clones and an Imperial captain can hide, so Selpa suggests Jakku, and Dogma agrees. Selpa legs it once they're on the surface but Dogma feels that she's kind of his responsibility because he freed her, so they keep tabs on one another. Over the years they meet here and there, and Selpa eventually falls for him in turn, though she doesn't feel as if she's good enough morally to deserve to be with him so she continually pushes him away.


	3. Chapter 3

When Rey dreams she sees a tear-streaked face and dirty hands and dark eyes and dark hair. She hears a voice but it’s different every time she sleeps, and she smells sweat and oil and motor fumes. The dream always ends with the roar of the ship as it punches skywards, and when she wakes it takes only seconds for the image of that face to escape her mind like water through the fingers. For the first few years she tried to hold onto it. She would bolt out through the linen walls of her and Selpa’s shelter to dig the shape of that face in the sand. It would dissolve, though, and she would be left on her knees with grit on her hands and nothing else.

* * *

Rey is ten, and she has mostly given up on recording the face that comes to her in her dreams. It erodes in her mind how it erodes in the sand, and she is left now with dark pained eyes and a blur for a face.

They don’t have money. They don’t have paper or datapads. So Rey wakes and she lies on her back and she pictures those eyes until she feels as if she’ll burn an afterimage of them into her eyelids. If she can’t remember anything else, she’ll remember those eyes.

“Nima today,” Selpa tells her, as she swings her legs over the edge of the bed and stands. “Come on.”

“Before noon?”

The trip to Nima will take them right through the scorching midday if they set off now. Travelling in such heat means burns. Rey grunts and picks up her long linens, wrapping the cloth around her body in a draped figure eight and then up and around her face. She wraps her arms, too, and sits patiently as Selpa scrapes her hair up from her nape, already damp with sweat even at dawn.

“Usual?”

“Always,” Rey replies, because this hair and those eyes are all she has.

Selpa hums and forms the first bun. It’s a familiar ritual, done whenever Rey’s hair straggles out enough to need refastening. Rey is used to the tug of it on her scalp, and she sits with half-lidded eyes in the stifling morning warmth. It’ll burn off to a clean heat later in the day, but for now it is oppressive and soupy in the air and it makes her want to go back to sleep.

The last tie goes in, and Selpa scrubs a hand over the top of Rey’s hand and goes to where her pack is lying against the foot of her storage locker. She shoulders it, taking the weight with the ease of long practise, and Rey goes over and picks up her own. The sled with their salvage haul on it lies on the ground between them, and they meet eyes and pull a face at what’s to come.

The sled is a struggle. Their muscles burn and their skin sweats and they gasp together and drag it onwards, their feet leaving deep plough marks in the sand. They leave the shade of the solar panels and the linen sheets and the sunlight feels as if it will scald them, but they just grit their teeth and keep going. They’ve done this a thousand times. They know this pain, and they know that it is a pain they can beat.

They hook it up to the speeder and climb on. It’s a squeeze now, even more than it was when Rey first came under Selpa’s care, but Rey kind of likes Selpa’s arms around her, the chin on top of her head. She feels safe, and warm, and sleepy—

She dreams, and the woman is there, all dirty hands and desperation, and then she lifts her head and suddenly it’s Selpa, and Rey startles awake. They’re still on the speeder, metal warm beneath her cheek. Selpa squeezes her shoulder and then lets go. She hasn’t asked Rey about her night terrors – or day terrors, she guesses – since the first few weeks. They both have their demons.

Nima is a bowl of dust. Rey’s tongue sticks to the roof of her mouth with how dry it is. She and Selpa unhook the sled and drag it two hundred metres to Plutt’s ration station. There’s already a few people waiting, desperate thin things without any goods to trade and without any hope of mercy. They will die here, just a few feet from Plutt’s private locker and its mass of foodstuffs, and then others will consume them – clothes, meat, bones, all of it. They watch one another with dead eyes. They are waiting, hoping that they will not be the first to die.

Plutt isn’t in the window, but Rey can hear him snoring. Not _hear_ him, exactly, but she knows that he’s at rest. It’s a skill that she didn’t know to conceal before Jakku. Selpa catches her eye, because keeping it from her would have been impossible, and Rey shakes her head. They sit in the shade a careful six feet from the nearest watcher and wait for Plutt to open shop.

He does so an hour later, and still Rey and Selpa wait. A rail-thin boy dragging a metal strut behind him struggles up to the counter. Rey can see the bumps of his spine beneath his dark skin. Plutt stares at him, then at the strut, and then grunts and slides a meagre half-portion to him. The boy grabs it up, sobbing with relief, and when he turns he trips over the strut. The watchers surge forwards, startlingly fast for how hollow they appear, and they rip the packet from his hands. He screams, scrabbling after them, and then two of the watchers are fighting and the boy goes running out into the sun, clutching at hands that stream blood from where the watchers bit and clawed at him. Rey and Selpa stand to get out of the way of the scuffle as it continues around the floor, and drag their sled up to the window only when one of the watchers is dead and the others are – occupied.

“Two portions,” says Plutt, and then he turns his back on them.

On the floor, the watchers bite into something that squelches.

* * *

They eat in Nima, huddled beneath tarps, and this is how it ends. With Rey sitting opposite Selpa, the ache in her belly calmed a little by the food. With Jakku’s sun on its long descent through the sky. With a long line outside Plutt’s station, snaking around the chewed bones of the watcher who had died in the morning’s fight.

It ends with a careless mercenary straying to close to the desperate and the dying, with his blaster being ripped from his hip, with a wild shot that streaks red and terrible through the tarps of five tents and then through the tender shell of Selpa's skull, erupting her left eye from her face. Blood and worse spurts from the hole, and Selpa shakes and judders – only it isn’t Selpa anymore. It’s just meat, and Rey screams and scrambles backwards as the watchers surge from the shadows, swarming over her to where Selpa is still twitching in the sand. She hits and scratches at them but their desperation makes them strong, and she ends up sobbing in the dirt as blood turns the sand into reddish sludge.

This is Jakku. This is unfairness and scrabble-hard living, a fifty-year-long life ended in the most awful and most wasteful way in just one terrible instant. 

A hand fists in the scruff of Rey's tunic, hauling her to her feet, and she looks up to see Dogma standing over her. His teeth are bared in a blunt human snarl, and she follows his furious gaze to see a watcher, a man who’s barely out of boyhood, his belly bloated and his limbs skeletal. There’s a blaster hanging from one of his hands, and the muzzle still shimmers with the heat of the shot that destroyed Rey’s world.

Dogma is going to kill the boy, will fire at him and add more blood to what's already in the sand. Rey sees it in his eyes, and she’s hurting and there’s blood and – and – other stuff on her face, on her clothes, so she screams again and bites at his arm. He drops her, swearing, and she bolts away. She leaves the rations and she leaves Selpa’s rifle blaster and she runs, all the way back to the speeder, and she throws herself onto it and sets it away before she’s even swung her leg over it. She hears Dogma yelling behind her, but all that really matters is the sound of Selpa’s life ending. The bark of the blaster, the crush of bone and brain and eye.

Rey doesn’t cry, but that’s because the hurt is too deep. It’s beyond pain. Her grip on the speeder is automatic. Her route back to the shelter is automatic. She isn’t sure she’s even still alive inside her body, and she tests it by holding her breath until her chest burns. She gasps back her air, and it becomes a tearless wheeze, in and in and in and never out. She has to pull up the speeder or fall off, and she sits there for long minutes with her forehead pressed flat to the hot metal until the spots fade back out of her vision.

She reaches the shelter and she staggers in through the linens and she sleeps. She dreams of her mother, only the mother has Selpa’s face and Selpa’s dark skin and Rey comes awake with a sound like she’s dying. It almost feels like she is. She probably will, without Selpa to care for her. That stupid skinny rat of a boy has killed Selpa, and he’s killed her as well.

She lies there until darkness comes, and she does her best just to breathe.

* * *

Morning. Rey gets up, changes her linens with hands that absolutely do not shake, and goes through her routine. She dusts the solar panels, checks the water reclaimer, and then she goes to arrange morning meal. She takes out two bowls and then she sits down heavily and puts her head in her hands until her heart stops pounding. She gets up and puts one bowl away, her hands lingering on the chipped edges. Then she remembers that she left their rations in Nima when – when Selpa. When it happened. So she puts her own bowl away as well. The watchers will have the rations by now, and Plutt won’t replace them.

Her stomach gurgles. She sits down with her back to the bed and drops her head back against the blankets. The boy has killed her twice over.

She dozes like that through noon and into afternoon, and then she opens her eyes and sits bolt upright with a start. She pictures the blur of her mother’s half-remembered face. She pictures Selpa.

She stands and shoulders her pack, because Rey knows three things for certain in this life. Her name. Her age. And that they’re coming back for her.

She has to be alive for that last part to work.

* * *

There’s blood on Rey’s trousers. She stares at it for long minutes, and then she sets her jaw and she wipes herself as clean as she can and wads up tissue to line her underwear until she can find something better. Tissue just for this purpose seems wasteful, and it makes her skin itch. But the rubber cup is back on Jakku, so this will have to do.

It’s been five years since her last blood. She’d forgotten the sharp ache in her belly, the unpleasant slide of blood from between her legs when she stands.

She spends the rest of the day changing out the tissues for fresh ones whenever the blood overwhelms them, and though she’s been far dirtier on Jakku she actually finds herself missing the rubber cup that got her through all the bloods she’s ever known. She eats lunch with Finn and Poe like that, and then when her belly is full but still hurting she leaves them and heads for the infirmary. She knows it well from Finn’s time here, but the smells unsettle her even while the hum of machinery is a comfort.

She’s caught up with so many things since she left Jakku. She’s always been ahead of the curve with machinery thanks to Selpa’s lessons, but she’s been missing out on the knowledge of things from a more sheltered life. Things like eating well enough on a regular basis to have your blood return after five years of nothing, and what that means for your body.

The nurses recognise her because of course they do, and they get so flustered that Rey ducks away from them all and shuts herself into a dark room. She keeps the light off so they won’t know she’s in it, and sits herself on the white-shrouded examination table. She lays down and presses her cheek against the cushioned headrest, missing the hot hard metal of the speeder that had kept her alive for all those years on Jakku.

She’s found like that perhaps a half hour later, but not by the nurses.

“There you are,” says General Leia Organa from where she stands silhouetted in the doorway.

Leia blooms warm and amused in the Force, and Rey sits up and stares at her. “You’re a Jedi?”

“I don’t have time to be a Jedi,” snorts Leia. “But close enough.”

Rey doesn’t know why Leia has come to her. Disquieted, she pulls up her knees and wraps her arms around them. “You’re not like Luke.”

“I wouldn’t want to be,” says Leia, but there’s nothing hurtful in it. Just simple fact. “Though I’ve got to tell you, hiding from the medstaff? Now _that’s_ Luke.”

“I’m not hiding,” says Rey, and Leia smiles with aching gentleness, entering the room fully and closing the door behind her. Then she pauses, only a step inside, and reaches back and opens it again. Rey watches her do it with sharp eyes. “I don’t need that,” she says, and she’s lying. “I don’t need you to do that for me.”

“I wanted to,” says Leia, and Rey subsides.

Leia comes four steps closer (Rey counts them out of habit) and holds out her hand. There’s a box in it, and on the side Rey can see a picture of the same kind of rubber cup she’d taken from Selpa’s lockbox when she was thirteen and lost. It’s a little different, but it clearly serves the same purpose.

 _I didn’t say anything_ , Rey thinks.

 _You didn’t have to_ , Leia replies, her voice clear as a bell and oddly younger even while her mouth remains still and silent.

Rey takes the box. Leia is no Selpa, as Selpa was no Leia, but they are strong women divided by time and circumstance, and Rey imagines that in another world the two of them might have been friends. If Selpa hadn’t once been Ciena Ree, enemy captain. That would certainly have been something of an obstacle.

When the box is in Rey’s hand, Leia looks her dead in the eyes and slides a careful image of the proper insertion of the cup into the front of Rey’s mind with the precision of a laser cutter. Then she leaves, and Rey is along again in the dark room with the cup boxed up in her hand. Leia takes her warmth in the Force with her, and Rey shudders in the sudden cold.

* * *

After that, Leia comes and goes. She always finds Rey, whether she’s out beneath the shadow of Poe’s bird or in the shooting range with Finn or sitting by herself up on the grass covering the bunkers. Leia is cold steel and warmth all at once. She seeks Rey out but is always so careful to pause at the edge of her vision and give Rey chance to see her.

Rey dreams of her mother’s blurred face, then of Selpa, and then the figure is hugging her and it’s Leia, all strong arms and warm eyes. She wakes from that one to warm bodies either side of her and the hum of BB-8 charging in the corner, and her breathing is steady but her skin is damp with a cold sweat. She wriggles out from between Poe and Finn and out the door. She goes down the corridor, following the dim glow of the emergency light that stripe the edges of the floor. Her feet are bare.

The communal restrooms are empty. A chrono above the door blinks the time down at her in sickly green, washing out her face when she catches her own eyes in the row of mirrors. She bends over a chipped yellow basin and cups her hands beneath the faucet. The water is cold, but it’s _water_. When she bends her face to her hands the wet splash on her face is decadent beyond even the fruits that Poe keeps finding for her, new ones every other day in all colours and shapes. She braces her hands on the sink and lets the drops crawl down her chin and nose and lashes and _plink_ down into the bowl.

The restroom is empty and cold, but outside there’s a bloom of warmth and awareness. Leia is waking, and Rey feels it as she reaches out, up from the surface and the thousands of sleeping Resistance troopers, up through the clouds and to the edge of space. She’s searching, half-asleep, and Rey chokes at the crush of _feeling_ as Leia comes fully awake and yanks her Force presence back all the way down into her body. Leia is no Jedi. _Hah_.

 _Good morning_ , says Leia, and she presses warmth into an ache in Rey’s skull that she hadn’t known was there. _I hurt you_.

 _It’s all right_ , says Rey. She straightens, stares at her own face in the mirror, eyes tracking the slide of droplets down her face.

 _Still, I’m sorry._ A pause. Rey imagines her standing by her bed, all stern eyes and hair like woven steel. _Kid. You want breakfast?_

Rey thinks of Poe and Finn warm and asleep just down the corridor. She imagines going back, crawling back into the middle of them. Falling asleep and dreaming of her mother, faceless but for her eyes. She remembers the ache in Luke’s eyes when he looks at her, and the exact shape of his silences. She imagines that they fit into that blurred face.

Her mother is a question for another time, and Selpa is long dead. But Leia is here, and she’s steel and warmth and all Rey has to do is answer.

She watches herself smile. _I could go for breakfast._

           


End file.
